Henry Kissinger: War Criminal or Old-Fashioned Murderer?

Incredibly, Henry Kissingerthe man who rivals Pol Pot for
the dubious honor of being the person responsible for the death of
the largest number of innocent people in South East Asia (and far
surpasses Pol Pot in criminality when one factors in Kissinger's
various levels of responsibility for wholesale slaughter and
repression in other parts of the world)still wields significant
power in the United States; but his role as eager facilitator of mass
murder, totalitarian repression and other atrocities is never
discussed in polite society. Although Kissinger is a frequent guest
on Nightline, where he is treated as a harmless and venerable
elder statesman, his friend Ted Koppel has never brought up the topic
of Kissinger's responsibility for the horrifying deaths of so many in
Asia, Latin America and other areas of the world. It is safe to
assume that Koppel has no intention of doing so in the future.

In fact, Kissinger's continuing influence over what the US
government does, and what is reported about what the government does,
can clearly be seen is a relatively recent media event: Kissinger's
significant behind-the-scene role in effecting CNN's retraction of
the "Tailwind" story.

CNN's ostensible justification for the retraction is laid out in
the compromise-ridden
Abrams/Kohler
Report. Although the Tailwind story's producers, April Oliver and
Jack Smith, had ample evidence to draw the conclusions that they did
(see the Oliver/Smith Rebuttal to the
A/K
Report), CNN quickly caved when the Pentagon and Kissinger, whose
role in the indiscriminate mass killings in South East Asia is a
well-known but never-mentioned (by the mainstream media) fact, both
objected to the story. "Tailwind" alleged further U.S. atrocities in
SE Asia during Kissinger's reign, specifically the use of poison gas
during an illegal U.S. black operation in Laos. (Imagine the U.S.
media retracting a story about an atrocity committed by Saddam
Huessein because Saddam claimed it never happened.)

When the usual right wing flacks, predictably, went ballistic over
the story, CNN quickly decided on a strategy of appeasement and hired
Floyd Abrams to work along with David Kohlerwho, as CNN's legal
advisor, had already given Smith and Oliver his advice that the
Tailwind story was, as prepared for broadcast, legally
defensibleto produce a report that would absolve CNN's
upper-management of any wrong-doing. That is precisely what their
report did. The A/K report systematically ignored the best,
strongest, and most direct evidence that Oliver and Smith had amassed
during the course of their investigation and condemned the Tailwind
story by adhering to a simple strategy: it examined only the weaker,
subsidiary evidence and disingenuously implied that this
weaker evidence was in fact the most significant evidence the
producers had found. In short, Abrams and Kohler set up a straw man,
then knocked it down.

But neither Kohler nor CNN ever explained what had changed, what
new evidence had come to light, to effect Kohler's 180-degree
turn-around. How, in two short weeks, did the evidence that Smith and
Oliver had compiled go, in Kohler's mind, from justifiable and
responsible to insufficient and insupportable? This is a question
that the A/K report does not even pose, much less answer.

CNN has, however, said what allegedly was not a factor: CNN
adamantly denies that the unprecedentedly quick retraction had
anything to do with the pressure applied by Kissinger, Colin Powell
and other powerful government people thus leaving a vacuum at
the center of the rationale for this whole embarrassing and
unnecessary reversal. CNN would much rather leave this incident
hanging with no explanation than admit it left two producers to twist
in the wind because of management's cowardice in the face of pressure
from powerful government-connected people. And CNN would evidently
much rather be in the good graces of the government than defend it's
dubious claims to any kind of journalistic integrity.

The A/K report does not claim that new evidence had come to light
to contradict what Smith and Oliver reported; rather, the report, and
it's co-author David Kohler, claim that the very evidence Kohler had
found compelling and legally defensible was now somehow neither, even
though that evidence had not changed. CNN's way of dealing with this
seeming paradox was to imply Abram's sole authorship of the report:
the CNN webpage where the full text of the
A/K
Report resides makes no mention of Kohler's name or of his role
in the writing and preparing of the report. There was no reversal,
CNN implies, because the evidence was being looked at by a different
person who reached a different conclusion about the worthiness of
that evidence. Kohler's role in the A/K report went down the memory
hole.

CNN's quick retraction and summary firing of producers Oliver and
Smith sent an unmistakeable message to anyone who might want to
follow up on this story: approaching this issue, even if in good
faith (and even the compromised Abrams/Kohler Report concludes that
Oliver and Smith acted responsibly and in good faith), will
cost you your job and your good name. When the rest of the mainstream
media gleefully jumped on the bandwagon to condemn CNN and Oliver and
Smith, it became clear that nobody in the mainstream media was
going to follow up on this story despite the convincing preliminary
case made in the Tailwind report, and despite the many promising
leads that have yet to be pursued. Needless to say, CNN's summary
firing of Smith and Oliver pulled the rug out from under them: they
had been working on a follow-up to the original Tailwind story when
CNN gave them the shiv. CNN has ensured that that story will
probably never be told.

The media, once again, fell all over itself to become apologists
for the Pentagon and the National Security statesome going so
far as to claim that CNN admitted the story was "false", when in
fact, CNN's retraction, while pusillanimous and abject, went no
further than to say that story "could not be supported".

It should be noted that Smith and Oliver repeatedly asked to
interview Kissinger for the story; Kissinger repeatedly refused.
Clearly, Kissinger would rather work his magic behind the scenes and
not be forced to answer questions about his role in the affair.
Amazingly, many in the mainstream media viewed Kissinger's outrage at
the Tailwind story as evidence that the Tailwind story was not
true.

A footnote: Peter Arnett, the reporter on the Tailwind story,
attempted to distance himself from it as the right wing's attack on
the story turned the heat was up. As the rest of the mainstream media
jumped on the attack bandwagon, Arnett made the rounds of news
sources claiming he was only the talking head for the story, and had
little, if anything, to do with its content. He apologized for the
story, as required by the higher-ups at CNN, and publicly agreed with
CNN management's position that the story was fundementally flawed and
deserved to be retracted.

A year later, Arnett, a veteran war correspondent and the only
US-based reporter to attempt to report on the effect the American
bombing during the Gulf war was having on the Iraqi populace (for
which he was villified by the right, including many right-leaning CNN
employeesmany of whom had been gunning for him ever since) was
unceremoniously fired by CNN. (CNN's coverage of the Gulf War, it
should be noted, was saved from being as rah-rah jingoistic as all
the other networks' almost exclusively by Arnett's reporting from
Baghdad. Otherwise, CNN unquestioningly submitted to the military's
censoring of the war, unfailingly relayed the military's absurdly
inflated claims regarding the woefully underperforming "smart bombs"
(which rarely, if ever, hit the intended target), and hewed to the
government's party line. CNN's Pentagon employees hated Arnett for
reporting the truth about the indiscriminate carnage happening in
Iraq as a result of "smart bombs" missing their supposedly military
targets.)

Like a victim of the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s, Arnett's
public admission of his "guilt" ultimately did not save him from
being purged. Of course, in the US, "purging" may mean loss of job,
loss of "credibility", loss of career prospects...but obviously not
death, as it did to the victims of Stalin's terror. And while risking
the loss of one's job and one's career prospects ought not to be
taken lightly, still it is a sad commentary on the state of
mainstream journalism that so few American journalists are willing to
take that risk. One does not need to look back to Stalinist Russia to
find examples of countries where crossing the establishment could and
often does mean a death sentencethere are a multitide of
examples of such countries today (many of them U.S. client states).
But, again, it need not be pointed out that the U.S. itself is not
one of them. One may be ostrasized, marginalized, and effectively
silenced, but obviously not murdered. The personal risk is real for
any journalist who steps out of line, but it is comparatively small.

Still, the courage of journalists such as April Oliver, Jack
Smith, Robert Parry
and Gary Webb deserves recognition. Gary Webb has been vindicated,
and Oliver and Smith, I have no doubt, will be too, in time. Arnett's
willingness to accomodate CNN's management did not save him: he was
just as surely purged as Smith and Oliver, who courageouslyand
with good reasonstood by their excellent reporting on Tailwind.

Admitting that he loved Big Brother did Arnett no good; it merely
delayed the whisper of the axe. Ultimately, nothing less than his
complete purging was deemed acceptible as expiation for the "sins",
both past and present, he had committed; and his attempts to stave
off the inevitable look, in retrospect, sad and pathetic. Arnett's
frantic damage-control was unable to re-gain for him the tenuous
mainstream favor he lost simply for being involved with the Tailwind
story; and his willingness to say whatever he was required to say to
attempt to save his position at CNN has, understandably, not won him
any friends among those who believeand, I would say, believe
rightlythat the Tailwind story deserved to be told and, when
attacked, defended. It certainly lost him the sympathy of those who
feel that journalistic integrity ought not to be so easily given up.

It has now been years since the Tailwind story was broadcast and,
to my knowledge, it has not been followed up by anyone in the
mainstream. With CNN's help, Kissinger, Powell, Reed Irvine and their
ilk have effectively killed it off.

For further insight into what CNN thinks qualifies as "objectivity"
when covering our government, see Alexander Cockburn's article on
CNN's use of US
PSYOPS operatives as interns at CNN's Atlanta news headquarters.
(See FAIR's Action Alert here.) CNN's rah-rah
stance on US troops during the Gulf war; CNN's sponsoring of the
Clinton administration's propaganda seminar that attempted to set
forth the reasons for (and only for, not against) initiating
another bombing campaign against the people of Iraq; CNN's quick
retraction of the well-researched and justifiable Tailwind story to
accomodate the hurt feelings of the likes of Henry Kissinger, Colin
Powell, and right-wing flak-hack Reed Irvine (whose "Accuracy in
Media" flak-tank came about as a result of the right's desperate
attempt to deny the My Lai massacre and justify the US's illegal
invasion of, and continued presence in, Vietnam)you decide...is
CNN a prime (though certainly not lone) example of an
adjunct to
government?

The latest obscenity:

It strikes me as outrageous, but sadly indicative of the
pro-American bias of the media (even the media that claims, as CNN
does, to be international and thus relatively free of such bias),
that CNN would conduct the following interview with Henry Kissinger -
and print the transcript on their web site - and yet never even
allude to the fact that Kissinger has a long history of
terrorist sponsorship that makes even Osama bin Laden's pale in
comparison.

The death toll for which Kissinger bares responsibility in
Indochina alone is in the millions, and Kissinger and Nixon were the
ones who expanded that terror to neighboring states, where they,
without warning or authorization, deliberately bombed populated
areas. The killing in East Timor, for which Kissinger and Ford
promised and delivered US backing, reached genocidal levels and, with
the help of Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the UN, the Ford
administration managed to keep the facts of that genocide off the
world agenda, as Moynihan bragged in his memoir A Dangerous
Place:

At the time of the Timor invasion, Moynihan was the United
States's Ambassador to the U.N. He wrote in A Dangerous Place
a couple of years later that the United States State Department
desired things to turn out as they did in East Timor and that it was
his responsibility to render the U.N. "utterly ineffective" in
anything it might do, "and I carried it forward with no
inconsiderable success." He proudly declared this knowing that "some
sixty thousand persons had been killed" by the Indonesian murderers
in the first weeks of the invasion - a figure he was aware
represented "10 percent of the population" of East Timor. Although
the blood-thirsty Indonesian aggressors had, at that point (early
1976), yet to commit the majority of the murders they ultimately
carried out - 140,000 more Timorese were fated to die at the hand of
Suharto's murderers, armed and trained by the US - Moynihan, after
running interference for the Indonesian killers, declared the world
"for the moment stable". Kissinger, Moynihan and Ford made sure the
money and armaments to carry out this genocide never ceased flowing
from the US and its allies, a policy continued by every succeeding US
administration, up to and including Clinton's.

The Taliban, Say Kissinger below, must "dismantle the structure of
terrorism" as well as "give up this one man [bin Laden]"; the US,
naturally, is obliged to do neither, and the man they ought to
be giving up to the docks of an international court on crimes against
humanity is instead living well and giving color commentary on
terrorism, such as what follows, for CNN and the rest of the
complicit mainstream media.

Kissinger: 'We can't tolerate
this'

(CNN) -- Henry Kissinger, U.S. secretary of state and
national security adviser during the Nixon administration, played a
large role in U.S. policy during the latter part of the Vietnam War.
He talked with CNN's Paula Zahn on Monday about last week's terrorist
attacks on U.S. targetsand offered his perspective on the road ahead.

CNN: Let's start off with the latest development. We know that
Pakistan's top spy and a former ambassador to Afghanistan have gone
to the Taliban and issued a demand: Give us Osama bin Laden in the
next three days or face military action. What's going to happen as a
result of that demand?

KISSINGER: Well, I think it's an ultimatum, and if they refuse,
there will certainly be military action. But I believe we have to go
after the Taliban anyway. They've been supporting these terrorist
activities all over the area and all over the world, and it isn't
enough for them to give up one man, they have to dismantle the
structure of terrorism.

CNN: Do you have any confidence that someone can accomplish that?
I think Madeleine Albright in the last hour said it's like cutting
off the head of a snake and having all these other little parts trail
behind.

KISSINGER: Well, in part, that is correct. But these groups
require a base, they require money, they require organization, and if
we can get them on the run and if they have to spend all their energy
surviving, they can't plan these meticulously prepared attacks that
we saw in New York and in Washington. And it isn't only Afghanistan,
there are countries like Syria that have bases, Sudan, some are
probably in Algeria, and we have to put governments on notice that if
they extend safe havens to terrorists, they will run the risks that
terrorists do.

CNN: So are you telling me this morning that the United States and
its allies might find themselves in the position of attacking Syria
and perhaps Iraq?

KISSINGER: No, I don't think we have to attack Syria because Syria
will close down these camps if they are brought under enough
pressure. Iraq, I would be open-minded on. If they have ties to any
of these terrorist networks, they should be attacked.

CNN: Let's explore further the impact of Pakistan, now offering
its support to the United States in exchange for retiring $30 billion
worth of debt and some other things they want taken care of by the
United States. There are folks like the Northern Alliance, the
opposition front to the Taliban, that says don't trust Pakistan. Do
you trust Pakistan?

KISSINGER: I don't know. I would judge countries by their
performance now, not by their words. The American objective has to be
to break up these terrorist organizations. I'm not saying that all
had to be done with military force; for example, there could be a ban
on travel to any country that has safe haven for terrorists, added to
economic pressures. But in the end these terrorist groups must have
training bases; they prepare these things at great leisure, and it is
dangerous for all of us, suicidal, to let them get organized, hit us,
then take one retaliatory blow and come back two or three years later
with another disruptive, murderous attack.

CNN: So while the Bush administration is exploring military
options, it is working around the clock to build a number of
different kinds of coalitions. Where do you think Russia is in all
this?

KISSINGER: Well, Russia is in a very curious position, and I hope
some of the reports that I have read aren't true, because no country
has been -- I was in Russia in July and talked to many of their
leading people. And their sense was of the danger of fundamentalists
and terrorists; of course, they were thinking in part of Chechnya.
Now they seem to be holding back a little bit, vis-a-vis Afghanistan
because they must have some pleasure in watching the Americans get
involved in Afghanistan. But at the end of the day, all these
countries have to understand that they are targets even before we
are; we're just a symbol. When they went after us, it was a symbol to
everybody else that if even America can be attacked, what chance do
you people have? And that's why we need a broad coalition. But we
cannot be made dependent on whether everybody agrees.

CNN: Secretary of State Colin Powell mentioned that an executive
order that was put into place in 1976 on President Ford's watch that
forbids assassinations is under review. If that is lifted, and if the
United States and its allies can specifically target Osama bin Laden,
who the president says is the prime suspect, how will that change the
efforts in the months to come?

KISSINGER: Not much. We're not good at this. If this assassination
order was interpreted that we couldn't bomb a building in which Osama
is located, then it will free us for that sort of attack, but hiring
assassins that go after individuals is not something Americans are
very good at. I support whatever Secretary Powell proposed, and
altogether, I'm impressed by the decisiveness of the administration.
So I don't think that will be the key element. The key element will
be: one, whether we can generate a consensus; secondly, whether we
will keep going after our initial, hopefully, success, because this
is going to be a long effort as the president has said.

CNN: You said that, and Sunday we heard a number of cabinet
secretaries repeat that message. What is it that the American public
should be prepared for? I heard someone say a 10-year war.

KISSINGER: Well, it could be a prolonged war, but its intensity
will diminish, and after a while it will be a mopping-up operation.
And what we have to remember is, if we don't do it, we will remain
permanently vulnerable. People who rely on us and others even who
don't rely on us are going to be under an even greater threat than we
are, and that means that the world will be dominated by terrorists,
and we can't tolerate this.

CNN: One last question for you: Do you think U.S. intelligence
knows where Osama bin Laden is today as we speak?

KISSINGER: Well, they probably don't know the street number, but
they probably have a general idea of the region where he's located.
And we ought to give some credit to our intelligence services because
they've been under tremendous pressure from our domestic
institutions, and they've had a tough job.

CNN: So you are not willing to say U.S. intelligence has failed
America?

KISSINGER: No. I think U.S. intelligence has been -- if you look
at one investigation after another, they have done as good a job as
they could under the circumstances.